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Wednesday, 15 March 2017

BDS Violence in Holland.

When I visited Holland in 2015 to
speak to Jewish and Christian audiences and to have private meetings with
pro-Israel leaders I was told how Dutch Jews were increasingly fearful about
speaking out or showing their support for Israel. Their main fears derived from
the threatening atmosphere being stoked up by anti-Israel protesters and BDS
activists.

I was introduced to Rabbi Benjamin
Jacobs, the head of the Dutch Jewish community, who has been the victim of five
attacks as Jews have been targeted in proportion to the rise of BDS and other
anti-Israel activism in Holland.

So it was surprising to find my
talk to the Jewish audience in the Liberal Jewish Center in Amsterdam attended
by what I was told were three of the leading members of the Dutch BDS. Here
they were sitting in the Anne Frank Hall in the presence of the people who told
me they are fearful of them.

I purposefully engaged one of
them in a public dialogue. One openly admitted that the BDS cause was to
achieve a One-State solution and not the achievement of a two-state peace deal.
In other words, he was loyal to Omar Barghouti, the BDS founder, who has always
advocated the end of the Jewish state of Israel. This character wearing his brown shirt
emblazoned with ‘BOYCOTT ISRAEL’ stickers on a background of a
Palestinian flag certainly subscribes to a Palestinian state “from the river
to the sea.”

In the end I wiped the floor with
him in an exchange in which I deconstructed all the emotional tropes he could
hurl at Israel. I showed him, but more
importantly the audience, how the insults he threw at Israel applies in spades
to the Arab regimes that surround Israel and to the Palestinian themselves.

Apartheid state? Look at Jordan
that has kept tens of thousands of fellow Arabs and Muslims in refugee camps,
stateless, for seventy years.

Ethnic cleansing? Look at the
Syrian slaughter of Palestinians and the mass deportation of Palestinians from
Kuwait.

Gaza blockade? How about Egypt’s total blockade of Gaza
compared to the thousand truck that flow into the Gaza Strip from Israel daily.

Human rights? This
‘pro-Palestinian’ BDS advocate never
protests the horrendous human rights abuses perpetrated against their own
people by both Fatah and Hamas.

BDS hypocrisy is staggering.
Their arguments may be emotionally eloquent to the uninformed but they are
intellectually dumb to those who know the facts. Why then are Jews in Holland afraid to
challenge these idiots?

BDS activists show their
stupidity regularly. Take, for example, the case of the BDS idiot who, after a
morning spent in Dam Square trying to persuade people to boycott Israel, walked
into a falafel café to satisfy his hunger. This fool wasn’t aware that he was
giving his money to an Israeli-owned fast food chain! Talk about dumb and dumber.

What is disturbing in Holland,
and in Amsterdam is particular, is that the BDS are allowed to pitch their lies
every week in Dam Square but pro-Israel activists are allowed
to hold counter-events in the same square but they are unprotected.

Two brave and insistent
girls, Brenda Aartsen and Sabine Sterk, who started a group called 'Time To Stand Up For Israel' recruit fellow lovers of Israel to join them in a quiet presence at the same time BDS occupies Amsterdam's main square.
They draw attention by draped themselves in large Israeli flags. They engage in pleasant conversations with tourists and visitors and display a large
floor poster displaying the name of their group.

Their constant presence has driven the BDS mob to
frenzy and violence.

On Sunday March 12, 2017, one hot
head showed the true face of BDS. He told a girl wrapped in an Israeli flag; “You fucking Jew Zionist! Go to your own country
and demonstrate there.” The Israel supporting girl was Dutch and
Christian. When the abuser saw a man
taking pictures he ran and attacked him. Others came to the cameraman’s
assistance and the BDS hooligan attacked one man severely causing him head
wounds while also spraying people with blue paint.

The police were not present
in the square at the time of the incident. Sabine tracked the assailant while calling the police emergency number. When the attacker saw her following him he turned on
her and was about to attack her but two men protected her. He spat
in her face before the police arrived and arrested him. The helpers acted as witnesses.

In an earlier incident the girls
received death threats from Haya el-Fatahi, a radicalized Muslim woman. A week later this woman returned to Dam
Square and was filmed smashing Sabine's camera from her hand as she filmed the assault from this Moroccan-born agitator. Her trial
will take place on May 10th.

During the March riots in Rotterdam, Dutch Muslims supporting Turkey's Erdogan's insults against the government, called the Dutch government "cancer Jews." This has been heard by BDS supporters in Dam Square Amsterdam.

The rise of the Green Party in the Dutch parliamentary elections is also worrying. They have traditionally been anti-Israel and the Green success will embolden radical anti-Israel forces within the party in the days ahead.

It appears Jewish and pro-Israel
communities in Holland do have genuine cause for concern. The complaints I hear is that they feel
unprotected by the police and the authorities and are told to stand down and
not to challenge the anti-Israel mob that have been allowed the free reign of
Dutch democratic privileges. Court leniency make Brenda and Sabine fearful that abuse and violent behaviour by BDS hooligans will go unpunished.

However, the stubborn resistance
of two Christian girls must be applauded. They are prepared to go into the
square to offer an Israeli perspective in the face of lies and threats.

These two
girls show the rest of us that it really is time to stand up for Israel.

Barry Shaw is the Senior
Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.